On the evening of October 14, 2026, the Rodney Room inside the University of Delaware's Perkins Student Center will fill with ghosts, goblins, and amateur detectives. "Unplugged: Halloween Murder Mystery," running from 5 to 7 p.m., invites students to arrive in their favorite Halloween costume and spend two hours untangling a fictional crime. Gift baskets go to the winners. It is free, open to the campus community, and organized in collaboration with Residence Life & Housing.
The event is the latest installment of "Unplugged," a University Student Centers program built around a simple premise: put the phones away and be present. The series' most explicit statement of that mission came at its April 8, 2026 "Unplugged: Murder Mystery Dinner," also held in the Rodney Room, where participants were asked to seal their phones inside Yondr pouches -- small magnetic-locking bags that let guests keep their devices on their person while rendering them unusable for the duration. That dinner assigned each guest a character to play as the story unfolded, served a meal, and entered anyone who stayed to the end into a drawing for $100 gift cards. An earlier installment, "Unplugged–Cupcake Decorating," held November 13, 2025, in the Perkins Collins Room, offered four cupcakes per person, drinks, and charcuterie, with door prizes for those who remained the whole time.
The pattern across the series is consistent: limited capacity, an RSVP requirement, food, prizes for staying until the end, and a deliberate absence of screens. The Halloween murder mystery follows suit, though its listing does not mention the Yondr pouches that the April dinner used. What it does promise is a costume-friendly, participatory whodunit rather than a passive performance -- attendees are meant to do the solving.
The Yondr pouch itself has a story that fits the series' ethos. Yondr was founded in 2014 by Graham Dugoni, a former professional soccer player, in San Francisco during the height of the tech boom. According to the company, Dugoni conceived of the idea while surrounded by apps and devices encroaching on daily life, and he believed society would need protected places -- something akin to national parks -- where people could think and create without technology. The first pouch was hand-sewn, and Dugoni pitched Bay Area schools and music venues door to door. Yondr has since become the industry standard for phone-free spaces at concerts, schools, courthouses, and universities. The company's stated mission is to "alleviate the intrusion of personal technology to create vital, distraction-free experiences." At a murder mystery, where the whole point is noticing details and talking to the people around you, that logic is hard to argue with.
The venue carrying the event has its own long history at the university. The John A. Perkins Student Center is named for John A. Perkins, who served as University of Delaware president from 1950 to 1967. His tenure was one of the greatest periods of growth in the school's history: undergraduate enrollment tripled to 6,000 students, the graduate student body nearly doubled to 1,800, and new courses, departments, and colleges were added. Perkins established graduate programs with ties to nearby cultural institutions and oversaw construction of major facilities including the Delaware Field House, Morris Library, and the student center that now bears his name. The building was dedicated in 1958. It has housed student organization offices, meeting rooms, lounges, The Scrounge, The Hen Zone, the Bacchus theatre, and the University Bookstore, and it is home to The Review, the student newspaper, and WVUD-FM, the campus radio station. A wing for the bookstore was added in 1984, and the building underwent major renovations in 1997. Today it sits at 325 Academy Street, in the heart of campus, with hourly parking in the adjacent Perkins Garage.
The Rodney Room is the largest private space available in Perkins, equipped with projection and a sound system and able to hold up to 288 guests. It is a fitting stage for a campus mystery night -- big enough for a crowd of costumed sleuths, but enclosed enough to feel like a closed circle of suspects.
Perkins is the university's original student union and the larger of its two University Student Centers facilities, the other being the Trabant University Center. The Student Centers run a roster of signature programming: Perkins Live and Trabant Now, a weekly Quizzo, the annual Geek Week tradition, a Lights, Camera, Action movie series in partnership with Main Street Movies 5 that offers private Friday and Saturday screenings of new releases, and Engaging Matters, a collaboration with Student Diversity & Inclusion whose hallmark program is Hot Takes over Hot Plates. The "Unplugged" series sits alongside these as a smaller, more intimate offering -- limited seats, RSVP required, and a built-in incentive to stay to the end.
For students weighing whether to go, the pitch is straightforward. It costs nothing. It happens in a building most of them already pass through daily. It rewards a costume and a willingness to talk to strangers. And it asks for two hours without a phone, which, on a campus where the Unplugged series keeps returning to that theme, may be the real challenge of the evening.
Those interested should RSVP through the Student Central listing, since the series has historically capped attendance. The mystery itself -- the victim, the suspects, the solution -- stays under wraps until the doors open.